Hi Mowicz, thanks for letting us know. Unfortunately it seems to happen on a random basis and to a handful of users making it super frustrating and hard to track down since I'm unable to recreate it happening (i've only witnessed it once a while ago), we take down the ads, report it to the ad serving company and trust them to fix it, then stop getting reports from users about it and assume it has been corrected. Luckily it is completely harmless, but still is completely unacceptable.

I've contacted the ad serving company and they claim to be investigating into the matter (they seemed to have fixed it earlier, this is a different message indeed and is probably a new case). There are a lot of ads that go in rotation, MI also has it's own rotation, so without actually seeing which ad came up to cause the problem it's hard to narrow down the rogue ad.

The last time this occurred it seemed completely isolated to IE, the code in the rogue ad was only IE compatible (go figure), but micadjems it seems saw it happen in FireFox, which is definitely new.

I'll continue to look into fixes for the issue and alternatives for ad services we can use to continue to support the costs of running the site. I feel absolutely horrible knowing that some users are being inconvenienced like that and having random bad experiences with that annoying fake popup.

One potential solution to guarantee it from not happening, is to view MacInsiders in Firefox and block the all ad rotations by using the AdBlock Firefox plugin. While we need to support the site through advertisements, if you notice it keeps happening to you I would much prefer you to block sponsored ad rotations and have a clean experience on the site, rather than allow them to run and have the chance of that rogue ad coming up. Unfortunately there is no similar plugin that I know of that exists for IE.

On a side note: we're working on a Google Chrome browser supported theme for MI that will work better in chrome (dropdowns will actually function properly and render correctly in Chrome).

P.S. Great desktop background!

I use chrome and every once in awhile I seem to get forwarded to an ad. It doesn't crash my browser, though.

Update: I have replaced the ad tag used by that company with a new one that blocks out all Flash banners and possible iframes, I figure the rogue banner may be one of the Flash ones and using it to redirect. Keep me updated if you guys see it happening still. Thanks!

Thanks Chad, we all appreciate the hard work you put into the site. (:

Ironically, I feel the opposite. :p I'd rather put up with a couple of annoying ads now and then (even frequently) if it helped support the site. I'd also like to mention that I didn't mean to post this as a complaint thread or anything like that and simply thought it'd be helpful (my positive experiences on this site definitely outweigh any negative ones, haha).

Unfortunately since the page just kind of instantly forwards you, it's impossible to catch a glimpse of which ad is actually doing the damage. (Clever...which is ironic since the ad itself is not very clever at all). The funny thing is, I was forwarded there (in the past) while running Mandriva...and graphically, the layout of the 'virus scan' was Windows XP, so it must have been authentic. lol

I was wondering though, having had no experience with ad tags...is it possible to figure out which ad did it, by looking at the URL you're forwarded to? (Or is it still anyone's best guess?)

Regardless, I'll definitely keep you posted if it happens again.

Thanks Mowicz. And no, there's no way as far as I know to see exactly which ad was up there. It's very possible it's a Flash ad which would allow a rogue advertiser to show an 'innocent' banner which has some code in it to redirect to another site. That's the only way I can see it happening.. which is why the new banners now should filter out all Flash ads and only be plain graphics or animated GIFs.

I tried to get people to look at their cache and see what graphics loaded BEFORE the redirect happened. It's possible if you're using a browser like IE... where you can go into your temporary internet files, sort the cache files by date, and see what loaded and when. So for example, you'd see that the fake scan site loaded at 11:02pm, and right before that a graphic loaded called banner.swf or banner.gif from x.com and if you go to that URL or open that file you'd see the graphic that was loaded as the banner...

Unfortunately I didn't think of that when it happened to me that one time, but haven't been able to recreate the thing happening to be able to do it.

Damn, wish I thought of that earlier. I'll see if I can try that when I get home tonight (I'm on my office computer now).

what do you guys think about this?

trying2hard bra

My specs are better. :p





*points, in particular, at 8 gigs of RAM*